By David McCabe
It was a biblical Salomé who demanded John the Baptist’s head on a platter. And got it. But at the end of the month, a Salomé will be doing some good in the Hamptons.
The Salomé Chamber Orchestra, that is. Starting August 26, the group will begin a four-concert festival at locations around the East End, raising funds for two charities and, they say, awareness of classical music.
The orchestra, which started in 2009, is a family affair: It was founded by three siblings, Lauren, David and Sean Carpenter, all of whom are classically trained musicians who believe that music and charity go together.
“One of the things that we pride ourselves on is philanthropy via music,” Lauren Carpenter said.
The trio and their group will live up to that mission this month, as two of the four concerts in the festival benefit charities.
The first of those philanthropic performances, to be held at Guild Hall on August 26, will feature singer Rufus Wainwright along with the orchestra. David Carpenter will be the viola soloist.
The event will benefit the Trevor Project, an organization that seeks to provide crisis intervention and suicide prevention for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) youth. It has existed since 1998, when it was founded by three filmmakers who couldn’t find a suicide prevention hotline for LGBT youth to broadcast with a short they had made about bullying.
One of Salomé’s board members, Tom Dow, is the director of major gifts for the Trevor Project.
“Since the arts community and the LGBT community are frequently intertwined, the partnership made sense,” said Lauren Carpenter.
Ticket prices for the event range from $50 to $500. At the latter price, “Platinum” ticket holders will be able to meet the artists in the concert, which will include both classical and popular music.
The second charity concert of the festival will take place at the Nova’s ARK Project in Water Mill and benefits the TerraNova Foundation, which maintains the ARK Project. The project is a 95-acre preserve dotted with sculpture and performance spaces. The Salomé group will be performing in the Castle Barn on the property. That concert will feature music that takes its inspiration from nature.
The other concerts in the series are less about philanthropy and more about accessibility, Lauren Carpenter said.
“We really wanted to get the word out, we wanted to get the awareness out,” she said. “We wanted to show the Hamptons community what we were about.”
What they are about, they say, is making classical music more accessible to members of the public. For this reason, they are offering multiple concerts with programs and price points that can appeal to the general public.
A free concert at the South Fork Natural History Museum will be centered around a performance of the Pergolesi one-act opera “La Serva Padrona.” An August 31 concert at the Southampton Cultural Center will feature works by Tchaikovsky, Monti and others and solos by David Carpenter.
On the evening of September 1, the orchestra will take to Agawam Park to play a free program of audience friendly tunes like Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons.” The final performance will be at the Jewish Center of the Hamptons in East Hampton, and will focus on music of the Jewish Diaspora.
The group has come a long way since its founding in 2009 by the three siblings, so much so that Lauren Carpenter left her job as a manager at Google to work full time for an instrument-selling and appraisal business run by the siblings.
“It’s all a very synergistic world that we live in,” she said.
“At the time I was juggling three different jobs, but now I only have two, so it’s a lot more manageable,” she said of leaving the tech firm.
And yet, for a group that was formed by the union of three siblings, when it came time for them to choose a name for the project, they decided on something forever associated with, well, separation.
“We’re a conductorless ensemble,” Lauren Carpenter, “we sort of equated headless with conductorless.”
